18 September 2016 1:25 AM

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

So, Mr Slippery has finally slipped away, just before he was found out. I wish David Cameron lots of money in his future life, so much of it that he at last begins to wonder if that is what he really wanted.

But can we pause for a moment and ask how it was that this charming but pointless person rose to such prominence in our country?

His single most important action was to lend Western air forces and other assistance to Islamist fanatics in Libya. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee last week explained just how clueless and irresponsible this was, though it is a pity that so many of the MPs on this committee supported the Libya folly at the time.

The same goes for much of the media, which reported the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi more or less as if it was a sporting event, and the fanatical rebels were our team. They also gullibly repeated the most ridiculous atrocity propaganda, something any knowledgeable journalist is trained to treat with suspicion.

I have checked my own writing and broadcasting at the time and find I warned clearly against it, for example this from March 2011: 'Who are the Libyan rebels? What do they want? Why do we love them so? I've no idea, and nor has Mr Cameron… Some of the longest wars in history started with small-scale intervention, for a purpose that looked good and achievable, and ended up ruining millions of lives.

'The Soviet takeover of Afghanistan in 1979 ended with countless innocents driven into refugee camps, and the collapse of the Soviet state itself. It also left Afghanistan as a worse snake pit than before.'

I did not know the half of it. David Cameron's war created the appalling, unstoppable crisis of mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa, a gigantic movement of people unknown in previous history, which will in the long run transform the economic and political fortunes of our continent.

This catastrophe was his most notable act. He ought to be remembered for it. Many of you will be able to think of others, some deliberate (such as his daft energy, education, migration, economic and aid policies), others exploding cigars, such as his incompetent and contemptuous handling of the European Union issue.

He was one of the worst prime ministers we have ever had, but have we – have you – learned from this experience? Will you continue to turn to the smooth, the well-spun, the expensively suited and rehearsed, the ones endorsed by the same media who gushed over the Blair creature?

Already the forces that put David Cameron in power are uniting in a dishonest spasm of hatred against Theresa May's grammar school policy and the referendum result.

Will you be fooled by them again? Or will you learn that there is no such thing as 'the centre' and that those who claim to stand there are driven by nothing but personal ambition and vanity? And that they do not offer safety, but danger?

*****

Late last year a strange new law came into force in this country, making it a crime, punishable by prison, to use repeated ‘controlling or coercive behaviour’ in the home.

You might think there’s nothing wrong with that.

But what if it becomes one of the many offences in family law where social workers, police and courts assume that the accused is guilty, and he or she has to prove his innocence?

The growing numbers who have fallen into this pit simply do not get fair trials. No doubt some of them are guilty. But in many cases this simply is not proved beyond reasonable doubt. They lose homes, families, children, livelihoods, reputations and – sometimes – liberty.

And if we stop caring if they’ve been properly tried, we forge a weapon that may one day be used against us.

That’s why I really dislike the great fuss recently made about the BBC Radio 4 soap opera ‘The Archers’.

In this programme - which I have many times explained is openly intended as propaganda for ‘progressive’ ideas - two actors pretended to be a married couple. This long drama got under way as the new law came into force.

For months, the male actor pretended to be a perfect example of the ‘coercive control’ which extreme feminists claim is so common. Again and again he bullied and belittled the female actor, as if he were a Victorian squire who had her imprisoned in a cottage miles from civilization.

She submitted to it meekly for months in a way I doubt any modern woman would do for more than about five minutes. Then, in a bizarre and incredible scene, the male actor pretended to goad the female actor into pretending to stab him.

There was then a pretend arrest, and a pretend trial. There was even a pretend jury, made up of celebrity actors. And the nation was supposed to be terribly engaged, anxiously hoping that the fictional jury would pretend to acquit the female actor, so she could pretend to go back to her fictional home.

This rubbish had two propaganda aims. The first was to make more people willing to believe that this kind of thing is common, when we have no way of knowing.

The second was to give the audience information it never normally has, in any proper courtroom drama. Listeners thought they already ‘knew’ what had ‘really happened’. They ‘knew’ the male actor was ‘guilty’. Actually, they didn’t. They just knew what the scriptwriters had decided to portray, a fictional wicked man, fictionally coercing and controlling, and fictionally trying to get away with it.

But in any real trial on this charge, without solid evidence, and where the only two witnesses disagree, I am sure that some real jurors’ minds will be influenced, by this programme, towards convicting. As a result, an innocent defendant might go to prison for years. I think the BBC has done a wrong and shameful thing.

******

The story of the Prague assassination of the SS monster Reinhard Heydrich is a thrilling and bitter one, and has now been made into a major film, for the second time, or perhaps the fourth, if you count 'Hangmen also Die' and the Czech film 'Atentat' The new version ‘Anthropoid’, which stars Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, gets closer than before to the savage horror of the Nazi reprisals, and made me wonder, yet again, if this sort of assassination was justified.

The evil of the Third Reich continued all too efficiently without Heydrich. But the torture and collective punishment visited on the Czechs (whose subjugation we couldn’t and didn’t prevent) were frightful. Was any good really achieved? I grow less sure year by year.

**********

Why do suckers always fall for the claims of ‘medical cannabis’? Its advocates are invariably mixed up with the lobby for general legalisation. America’s leading campaigner for legal dope, Keith Stroup, said in a candid moment in 1979 that he was using medical cannabis as ‘a red herring to give marijuana a good name.’ Cannabis may make some people feel better, but so did Thalidomide. A drug correlated with severe mental illness may just not be the ideal miracle cure.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

07 July 2016 3:06 PM

A few years ago, I took part in a discussion (organised, I think, by the Spectator magazine) about mass immigration, sparked off by David Goodhart's book on the subject, 'The British Dream' Some kind person has assembled my contributions ( and the interruptions from the chairman, Andrew Neil):

12 June 2016 1:57 AM

I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.

If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

I am genuinely unsure how this will work out. I hope it will only destroy our two dead political parties, stiffened corpses that have long propped each other up with the aid of BBC endorsement and ill-gotten money.

I was wrong to think that the EU referendum would be so hopelessly rigged that the campaign for independence was doomed to lose. I overestimated the Prime Minister – a difficult thing for me to do since my opinion of him was so low. I did not think he could possibly have promised this vote with so little thought, preparation or skill.

I underestimated the BBC, which has, perhaps thanks to years of justified and correct criticism from people such as me, taken its duty of impartiality seriously.

Everything I hear now suggests that the votes for Leave are piling up, while the Remain cause is faltering and floundering. The betrayed supporters of both major parties now feel free to take revenge on their smug and arrogant leaders.

It has been a mystery to me that these voters stayed loyal to organisations that repeatedly spat on them from a great height. Labour doesn’t love the poor. It loves the London elite. The Tories don’t love the country. They love only money. The referendum, in which the parties are split and uncertain, has freed us all from silly tribal loyalties and allowed us to vote instead according to reason. We can all vote against the heedless, arrogant snobs who inflicted mass immigration on the poor (while making sure they lived far from its consequences themselves). And nobody can call us ‘racists’ for doing so. That’s not to say that the voters are ignoring the actual issue of EU membership as a whole. As I have known for decades, this country has gained nothing from belonging to the European Union, and lost a great deal.

If Zambia can be independent, why cannot we? If membership is so good for us, why has it been accompanied by savage industrial and commercial decline? If the Brussels system of sclerotic, centralised bureaucracy is so good, why doesn’t anyone else in the world adopt it?

As for the clueless drivel about independence campaigners being hostile to foreigners or narrow-minded, this is mere ignorant snobbery. I’ll take on any of them in a competition as to who has travelled most widely, in Europe and beyond it. Good heavens, I’ve even read Tolstoy and like listening to Beethoven. And I still want to leave the EU.

Do these people even know what they are saying when they call us ‘Little Englanders’?

England has never been more little than it is now, a subject province of someone else’s empire.

I have to say that this isn’t the way out I would have chosen, and that I hate referendums because I love our ancient Parliament. And, as I loathe anarchy and chaos, I fear the crisis that I think is coming.

I hope we produce people capable of handling it. I wouldn’t have started from here. But despite all this, it is still rather thrilling to see the British people stirring at last after a long, long sleep.

Two more victims of the Great Terror Panic

Our state-sponsored panic about the exaggerated terror threat is driving us mad. Recently I wrote about Lorna Moore, a young woman ripped from her children and flung into jail because she didn’t warn the authorities about something her husband (an alleged terrorist) probably didn’t even do.

Now we see an organic farmer, John Letts, and his wife Sally Lane, both in their 50s, remanded in custody on charges of sending money to their son. He may be up to no good in Syria, but that (unsurprisingly) hasn’t stopped them loving and caring for their child. Remanded in custody? From what I can see from court reports, the country is crawling with gaunt young men out on bail for violent crimes. So why are these two gentle people (who have another son at home) banged up in the cells and denied bail, while scores of dangerous louts roam the streets?

It is because of the magic word ‘terror’. It stops us thinking. Look at the Leytonstone knifeman, Muhaydin Mire. Back in December his crime – a horrible, bloody, random attack on a passer-by in a London Underground station – led the news. He was thought to be a terrorist. A man who called out ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv’ was much praised.

But he wasn’t no terrorist, either, bruv. When he was convicted on Thursday, the case was relegated to inside pages.

The attack was just as severe, the wounds just as deep, the crime just as bad.

But it’s now accepted by almost everyone involved that Mire was mentally ill. His family believe that this was caused by his use of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug cannabis – the one Richard Branson and Nick Clegg want to decriminalise. In fact, his family very responsibly tried to warn the police that he was a risk before the crime, and the police passed the buck, because nobody mentioned ‘radicalisation’.

Well, perhaps if the police and the courts were more interested in cannabis (which remains illegal, though they don’t enforce the law) than in terrorism and ‘radicalisation’, we’d actually be safer from the real and growing threat of unhinged young men wandering about in our midst. Some hope, but I thought I’d mention it.

******

What are British troops doing in Poland? Taking part in a ridiculous exercise in which we pretend that we would go to war in the event of a Russian attack in the region – which is about as unlikely as a Martian invasion. Actually, we’d be hard put to defend the Isle of Wight these days, let alone Warsaw or Riga. This folly creates the very problem it pretends to deal with – tension and fear. Why?

******

Sorry Meryl, I can't laugh at a man who's so scary

How odd that Meryl Streep, dressing up as Donald Trump last week, looks more like that noisy businessman than Mr Trump does himself. I am tempted to laugh. And then I stop myself.

Mr Trump’s rallies increasingly attract violence – by his opponents and his supporters. I actually find this terrifying. Any fool can start civil unrest and fan a populist bonfire by saying what he thinks the masses want to hear. But it is far harder to restore calm. I gasp at Mr Trump’s irresponsibility, and fear for the USA.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

20 March 2016 1:11 AM

Why do you do it? I watch you every day, nice, kind, respectable, generous people helping to throw your fellow citizens out of work and turn this country into even more of a bleeping, commercialised desert than it already is.Do you really want every job in the world to be done by a robot – except your own? Why do you think you are immune? Once you give in to this, how long will it be before you, too, are replaced with a flashing, winking machine with an infuriatingly soothing voice? Unexpected person in sacking area! In which case, how will you afford to shop at all the robotic stores and supermarkets which will sit in spookily staff-free colonies on the edge of every town, reached by robotic buses and patrolled by drones and robotic store detectives, who will mechanically detain anyone they suspect of shoplifting?A rather good glimpse of this Blairite nightmare was provided in the recent Hollywood film Elysium, in which contact with commerce and the state was almost entirely through machines, and even a hint of sarcasm towards them earned you a whack round the head from a cybercop, followed by an offer of happy pills to cure your discontent with chemical peace.Those who govern us, and those who sell to us, increasingly retreat into an impenetrable world where we cannot reach them. The last human contact is visibly dying. I went to the post office on Wednesday to send a letter by recorded delivery. Fifteen people queued interminably for two staffed counters, while an employee with a fixed smile tried to persuade customers to use machines instead, so helping to put herself out of a job in the long term.I have refused to do this (with occasional lapses at railway stations when I am short of time) for some years. At first, it seemed quite fun to do it all yourself. Then I caught myself, at an ultra-modern gas station in the endless Washington DC suburbs, rejoicing at how I was avoiding human contact. I was suddenly disgusted with myself for this anti-social laziness. Surely this bit of the world was quite lonesome enough already. Now, I stand and wait, often for quite a while, for the luxury of doing business with a human being. This is not just because the supermarket isn’t paying you or me the wages it saves by using robots instead of people. It isn’t just because I think there are quite enough unemployed people already.It’s because I sat back and did nothing while all kinds of people disappeared – bus conductors, patrolling police officers, park keepers, station porters – along with police stations and old-fashioned banks where they knew who you were. And the unstaffed world which resulted is bleak and dangerous, because nobody is watching except those cameras – and is anyone watching them? It only happens because we put up with it and take part in it. It wouldn’t be that hard to resist, but (as in everything else) we don’t.

Last October I was grieved and angered when it was claimed – on the basis of a single, ancient uncorroborated charge – that the late Bishop George Bell was a child abuser. I never met this austere, fiercely moral, self-sacrificing man, but he had stood in my mind as a rare example of goodness. If this charge is true, then that example dissolves in a mist of filth, and we have all lost something precious.I do not think it is true. Since last October, despite much publicity, no further similar accusations have been made. And several other admirers of Bishop Bell, including an experienced judge, a top-flight barrister, academics and senior churchmen, have got together to examine the case against him. They have found it was sloppily conducted, and failed even to look for, let alone find, a crucial witness, whose testimony strongly challenges the accusation.This seems to me to be a powerful blow for justice, and especially that ancient English justice of which we should be so proud, but often forget.

Cheap shot at a German star

Germany’s new political star, Frauke Petry, is in trouble for allegedly calling on border patrols to shoot refugees.Actually, she didn’t. Mrs Petry is not, in fact, Hitler. Though I suspect she wouldn’t be a reader of The Guardian either, there is quite a lot of ground between these two positions.I’ve checked her interview with a Mannheim newspaper and she consciously tried to avoid saying any such thing. She repeatedly told her interviewers they were trying to lead her into saying something outrageous.Eventually, pressed to say what a border policeman should do if refugees climb the fence and ignore orders to stop, she said: ‘He must prevent illegal entry across the border, if necessary even using firearms. This is the law.’ The reporter tried to suggest this was like East Germany’s hated policy of shooting anyone who tried to get out of that prison state. Mrs Petry replied: ‘No guard wants to shoot at a refugee. I don’t want it either. But in the last resort the use of firearms is appropriate. What is important is that we don’t let it get that far.’She called for agreements with neighbouring Austria to slow the flow of migrants. I am told that Germany’s law on The Direct Use Of Force To Enforce Public Order By Law Enforcement Officials (Section 11) permits the use of weapons by border guards against those who ignore repeated orders to stop. This must have been passed by the same parties which now attack Mrs Petry, pictured right, for citing it.But how far can Europe (all of it, not just the EU) go in defending its borders against the greatest economic mass migration in history? Countries surrounded by deep, rough, cold water used to be spared this problem, until the era of mass air travel. And we have that tunnel as well. Now, our frontier lies on the Mediterranean and the Aegean. These seas are not like those which surround Australia, nor are the countries from which the migrants come like the South East Asian nations. We cannot tow them back, or keep them on remote islands. And I don’t think we can shoot them either. How long could we stomach such a thing, even occasionally? Mass immigration has already happened. It began when we made our stupid interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It speeded up when we did the same in Libya and Syria. We are paying for what we did, and will pay for decades to come.

We are on the verge of giving the police terrifying and unjustified powers to hack into our private communications. The country should be convulsed with opposition. As it isn’t, don’t complain when you get hacked by the State.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

16 March 2016 5:31 PM

I have learned to be careful with continental movements which at first appear to be conservative. In France and Belgium, I tend to find that such groups have unlovely origins, which they are unwilling to disown. The founders of France’s Front National are, shall we say, ambiguous about the Vichy era and by implication the Hitler era.

Flemish nationalism in Belgium has similar problems with fully disowning the, er, questionable behaviour of some of its forerunners during the ascendancy of National Socialist Germany. And so on. When I describe Britain as being almost the only virgin in a continent of rape victims, this is, sort of, what I mean.

Almost every continental country experienced either a tyranny or a tyrannical occupation in the middle of the 20th century, polluting its past. Even the democratic neutrals, Sweden and Switzerland, were compelled to make sordid bargains with the German Empire (German troops crossed Sweden, German war materials crossed Switzerland, which was unable, out of self-preservation, to offer much sanctuary to Jews, and also offered a haven for money and gold whose origins were perhaps suspicious). Portugal, not then a democracy, was blown this way and that by the winds of power. This past continues to pollute much conservatism, just as past associations with Stalin pollutes so much of the Left. People who won’t deal frankly with either (depending on which albatross they have around their necks) don’t, in my view, deserve to be taken seriously.

But the new anti-immigration party in Germany (not ‘anti-immigrant’ as the BBC and the liberal media so tendentiously claim in their unbiased way) may not be of this type, any more than UKIP is here. Not that I am necessarily inspired by its success, any more than I was by the gains made by of UKIP.

I have made more than one voyage to Germany to examine various supposed revivals of neo-Nazi movements, none of which in fact turned out to be significant. They are invariably knuckle-brushing movements led by idiots. I think Germany has learned pretty thoroughly to avoid such things, which seldom get above 7% of any vote and swiftly sag into impotence, despite winning seats in local assemblies through proportional representation, and even qualifying for state aid, as they sometimes do (a good argument against state support for political parties).

These days such things tend to begin in the former East, partly because it is much, much poorer and partly because the old East German State did little in the way of de-Nazifying education, claiming as it did that it was the inheritor of the anti-Nazi part of Germany and so (unlike the West) did not need to do so.

The recent Pegida (‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West’) Movement certainly began in the East and was quickly found to have nasty elements in it. Actually crude hostility to outsiders is to be found all over continental Europe, where the racial and cultural tolerance common in post-colonial Britain is often absent, as I have been privately told by Polish immigrants explaining why they come here rather than to other EU countries. I have myself directly encountered this bitter loathing (directed against North Africans) in Rotterdam, the heart of supposedly liberal Holland. One of Pegida’s leaders was certainly guilty of using contemptuous and hateful language about migrants as such, rather than simply opposing immigration. I think it’s pretty much disqualified from serious politics. Any such movement in Germany has to be about 100 times cleaner than it would need to be anywhere else.

But the Alternative fur Deutschland is not quite so easily dismissed, which is perhaps why it did so well in Sunday’s provincial elections (though far better in the former East than in the West) .

The AfD began, much as did UKIP, among academics, economists and rather grand journalists concerned at the threat to German independence from the EU and to German prosperity from the Euro. It did quite well, but not well enough to win seats, in the 2013 federal elections.

But in 2015 it switched to much stronger emphasis on immigration (unsurprisingly) and found in Frauke Petry a new and persuasive leader. Mrs Petry, 40, is not a Farage figure, but a young woman in the modern style, educated and very much in tune with the world of today, not especially socially conservative in her life or opinions. She is a chemist who studied in Britain, at Reading University, but got her Doctorate from Goettingen. She is estranged from her husband (a Lutheran Pastor) and now living with a party colleague. She still takes her four children to church. She was born in the East but moved to the West in 1990 at the age of 14.

But she does have dangling round her neck the claim that she once called for border police to shoot refugees. Did she? I am genuinely unsure. I have yet to see a complete unedited version of what she said. Does anyone have one?

I thought I knew less after reading it than I felt I’d known before. What exactly did she say and in what sequence?!’ I want to shout at the reporter.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to put off a lot of voters in Germany on Sunday. There have been many analyses of these votes. Where did they come from? Often from people who hadn’t voted previously, and not necessarily from Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. But the AfD is now established as serious threat to Germany’s suffocating consensus, in which the equivalents of Labour and the Tories openly embrace each other in coalition government, instead of pretending to be hostile as they do here.

The AfD may come to threaten both major parties, if the migration problem is not somehow got under control. It also reflects a growing discontent with falling standards of living among Germans who had once been used to stable jobs and rising incomes. It might not help anyone to see this as a kind of revival of the Nazis. By doing so, you might miss the real point.

Personally, I think the moral impossibility of civilised countries using violence to guard their borders against migrants is one of the most complicated issues facing us. We're not as nice as we like to claim we are. For instance, a border featuring razor wire is itself a passive but severe threat of violent injury to anyone who seeks to cross it illegally. So is the presence of armed border patrols. What are we saying when we erect such fences and employ and deploy such patrols? Or even when we rely implicitly (as we in Britain do) on the depth and danger of the cold sea to keep our coasts secure from unwanted arrivals?

Yet in the end we are compelled by all we hold dear to weaken when the choice is to do so or to use violence, or to abandon people to drown in the sea. We will let people in, and rescue them. We have to, or we would not be the civilisation we are. Once it has got to this stage, I can see no alternative.

Australia, almost alone, is spared these dilemmas, because it has entirely maritime borders, composed of deep and inhospitable seas, and also because the countries from which migrants headed for Australia come have functioning governments and can be compelled to take them back . So it can repel unwanted illegal migrants by using measures (mainly interception on the high seas, towing back to point of departure or detention on extra-territorial islands) well short of lethal or even injurious violence. Not that these methods escape criticism.

The EU and the USA simply cannot do this. They have unenforceable land borders, which can be overwhelmed by numbers and cannot conceivably be adequately patrolled. And they face an unending migration across the often calm waters of the Mediterranean, from Libya which has no central authority, and across the narrow seas from Turkey, which isn’t prepared to exercise its authority and, even if it does accept returned migrants, can’t be expected to try very hard to keep them from trying again. Both EU and USA also lack extra-territorial islands on which to place unwanted migrants.

It might have been possible, 30 years ago, by exerting influence on nearby states, to persuade them to prevent mass immigration across the Aegean, the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande. But it’s my belief that many influential people in the US actively supported mass migration from Central America , as the USA was transformed into a low-wage economy (this caused a notable split in the US conservative movement in the early 1990s, in which social conservatives were pretty much flattened by Reagan-Thatcher-Murdoch economic liberals who had snatched the body of conservatism there much as they have done here) .

And I also suspect, but cannot prove, that many in the higher reaches of the EU felt much the same way. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi made no secret of his ability to open the gates of migration if he so chose, and blackmailed the EU by doing so, as I’ve mentioned here earlier. How odd that Britain and France should choose to overthrow him without having a clue what would replace him, and made a similar ill-planned assault on Syria which has been almost as disastrous from the migrant point of view. The most absurd thing about this has been the monstrous, ludicrous claim that Russia(!) is ‘weaponising’ Syrian refugees, when the whole problem has been caused by Western and Gulf actions. If it hadn’t been for Russia, Syria would be just like Libya only a lot worse and millions more of its people would be heading our way. Whereas if we and the Gulf states had stayed out, Syria would be peaceful. Is this what Freudians call ‘projection’, accusing others of the things you’re guilty about?

But getting anyone to say anything sensible about Russia is almost completely impossible. Even quite intelligent people are determined to see Moscow as the seat of all villainy, and this distortion makes it hard for them to see what is wrong with our own societies and governments. Perhaps that’s why they do it.

Share this article:

21 January 2016 4:30 PM

If you have consonants to spare, prepare to use them now. This is about Poland. a country that so often produces more history than it can consume locally. A new and fascinating crisis is erupting on the eastern fringes of the German Empire, sorry, European Union. As the Ukraine crisis, provoked by US-backed EU expansionism, sinks into torpor and stalemate, Poland is now pushing at the boundaries of ‘limited sovereignty’.

So let us begin with a quick rummage through the Cupboard of the Yesterdays:

Now, ‘limited sovereignty’ was formulated 100 years ago by Richard von Kuehlmann, the Kaiser’s Foreign Secretary. He was trying to put a landmine under the Russian Empire in Poland, the Baltic states and Ukraine. In the middle of the 1914-18 war, Berlin invented a pseudo ‘Kingdom of Poland’ to try to win over Poles who lived under direct Russian tyranny. Then came the collapse of Imperial Russia (brought about by the Bolshevik putsch in Petrograd, financed by German gold and prepared by the German agent Ulyanov, codenamed ‘Lenin’, smuggled into Russia under the supervision of the German general staff).

Germany’s intervention, and its decision to hire Lenin, was not idealistic and didn't even pretend to be (as its equivalent would nowadays) . The Bolshevik putsch followed the February revolution, a genuine political convulsion from below, which had overthrown the Romanovs and would have led to a constituent assembly, elected by what is almost certainly still the most free and democratic poll ever to have taken place in Russia. The Bolshevik coup destroyed the first non-autocratic government Russia had ever had, as that government wished to continue the war against Germany.

And these created the new, wholly German-dominated state of Ukraine. That was limited sovereignty, if ever there was such a thing. How all this would have worked out we shall never know, since Germany’s defeat in the West (by no means foreordained) cancelled the Brest-Litovsk Treaties.

Soviet Russia eventually grabbed back Ukraine by force. Poland became a French client state, and the Versailles jig-saw - supposedly a barrier against a revived Germany - replaced the former empires of the region with new states based on national self-determination. But it was complicated by the presence of awkward, unenthusiastic national minorities within their borders. As always, such minorities came in very handy when aggression needed to be justified.

is especially forgotten (as is the anti-Semitism that was rife in that country at the time) because it upsets the ‘plucky little Poland’ myth, part of the general myth in which World War Two has been transformed into a simple struggle between good and evil, by ignoring large quantities of actual history.

I make no apologies for this history lesson. These things, along with the bodily westward shifting of Poland to satisfy Stalin in 1945, the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn (subject of an official lie maintained in Poland and the Soviet bloc until the fall of Communism) , the very violent and cruel mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from the region after 1945 (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html )

are not forgotten in these regions and still influence thought and speech.

So bear them in mind when you study Poland’s new government, described in tones of maidenly horror by Europe’s liberal, pro-EU media,( and in tones of absolute loathing by Ryszard, a Polish acquaintance who works in a coffee shop near my London office and who is utterly horrified by what has overtaken his home country).

I myself do not much like this government. Its main strength flows from the fact that it has an absolute parliamentary majority, with which it is seeking to impose its will on the courts and the state broadcaster. The things about it which I quite like (a combination of social conservatism and resistance to mass immigration, with social democratic welfare measures and a real concern for the unemployed) are cancelled out by its unreliability on the key issues of law and liberty.

The best critical articles about it come from my old friend Tim Garton Ash, who (despite being a bit liberal) knows more about Poland than almost any English person. Tim was fairly relaxed to start with

The EU, having been burned by intervening in Austrian politics some years ago, and has had similar difficulties with the Orban government in (much smaller) Hungary, is probably itching to put pressure on this wayward member. But the EU is also constrained by the fact that it is nowadays rather obviously dominated by Germany, a country which is debarred by history from intervening too openly in Polish internal affairs. Martin Schulz, the German President of the European ‘Parliament’ , probably hasn’t helped get Poland to conform by describing events in Warsaw as having ‘the characteristics of a coup d’etat’:

Maybe a French politician could have got away with this. But a German? Such interventions only strengthen the Law and Justice Party, and allow it to preen itself as a patriotic force. You’d think Germans would realise this, but they don’t always seem to.

Germany’s EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has said there is a ‘a lot to be said for activating the mechanism of the rule of law and putting Warsaw under supervision’. Supervision! So much for EU members being truly independent states (which of course they are not, but which, under ‘limited sovereignty’ they must be allowed to pretend to be).

I don't ,as I say, much like Law and Justice.

But then again, I did not much like its forerunner, which was pathetically pro-EU, though it wisely kept out of the Euro) and accepted huge quantities of EU money while its own native industries shrivelled and a low-wage economy more or less forced huge numbers of young men and women to find work abroad to support their families. It also imposed the EU’s secular, politically correct ideas on a Poland where many people are still conservative Roman Catholics.

What Tim Garton Ash notices about the Law and Justice government (and what I find most fascinating about it) is this. It is a new combination, deeply dangerous to the modern consensus. It is Corbynite on the welfare state, but conservative on culture and migration:

‘PiS [the Law and Justice Party’s rather unfortunate acronym in Polish] represents a large part of Polish society: patriotic, Catholic, conservative inhabitants of small towns and villages, especially in the poorer east and south-east of the country; people who don’t feel they have benefited from the transition to market democracy. It promises a strong state to protect them from the cold winds of economic and social liberalism. It is rightwing in culture, religion, sexual morality (no abortion or in vitro fertilisation), xenophobia (no Muslim refugees please, we’re Polish) and nationalism, but almost leftwing in its economic and social promises to the poor and left-behind’.

I am puzzled that no such combination has yet arisen in Britain, and can only explain it by the Labrador-like devotion of British social conservatives to a Blairite Tory Party which repeatedly kicks them in the ribs with its well-polished brogues, laughing as it does so. I have tried to challenge this barmy, servile devotion, but found it impenetrable.

The other thing is this. The EU has coddled Poland (with aid which will total 100 billion Euros by 2020) and not pressed it too hard to join the Euro. It has seen it as a star member, compliant, and an example which Ukraine might one day follow. And now, after a long period when it seemed to be on a smooth flight-path to ever-closer union, Poland’s national sentiments, previously buried under layers of Euromoney, have reawoken, partly thanks to harsh economic conditions and partly because a nation which has only recently re-established itself feels particularly threatened by Angela Merkel’s relaxed policy onwards Muslim migrants.

These are fundamental problems, not easily resolved either by negotiation or by pressure. Europe’s bitter, difficult history has come back once again to poke the idealists in the eye. The debts of 1914 have not yet been paid in full, and the damage it did is not yet repaired. Watch with interest.

Share this article:

10 January 2016 8:55 AM

Every educated and intelligent person glories in the freedom of women in Western societies to exercise their talents to the full, and their freedom to walk safely in the streets of our great cities.

So what are the enlightened minds of the Left to do when news comes of revolting assaults on women in front of Cologne Cathedral, one of the jewels of European Christian culture in one of Germany's proudest cities? And how are they to react when growing evidence suggests that at least some of the culprits are newly arrived migrants from the Muslim world?

With mumbled embarrassment and nasty jibes against those who have long opposed uncontrolled mass migration, that's how.

Police drive back right-wing demonstrators with a water cannon in Cologne in the wake of the sexual assaults around Cologne's main station on New Year's Eve

As an illustration, I had a radio clash with the Guardian writer Gaby Hinsliff on Friday (details here http://dailym.ai/1K6xp0W )

after she admitted that 'liberals like me are reluctant to talk about it'. While rightly chiding her own side, she couldn't resist dismissing opponents of mass migration as dinosaurs and their views as 'frothing rage'. Here is the news, Ms Hinsliff. Those who for many years warned against non-selective mass immigration (and were dismissed as bigoted dinosaurs by people like her) were concerned about just this sort of problem.

If migrants from other cultures arrive too fast and in numbers too great for society to absorb and integrate them, they begin to impose those cultures on the host country. Germany is witnessing this now, and so are we.

The louder our governments shout about their dedication to fighting Islamist extremism, the readier they are to Islamise our own society. The sheer size of the Muslim population compels them to do so.

That is why exams in England are to be moved to accommodate Muslim pupils taking part in the Ramadan fast. And it is why the Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, reacted to the first reports of women being molested in her city by advising them: 'It is always possible to keep a certain distance that is longer than an arm's length.'

Of course she has now been mocked so much that she has backtracked. But the point is that it was her first instinct, and what she really felt.

Radical multicultural types will in the end destroy the things they claim to like, because they don't understand that liberty and reasonable equality are features of stable, free, conservative societies based on Christian ideas, which guard their borders and are proud of their civilisation.

The people who really want to defend our enlightened society, in the end, are dinosaurs like me.

****

Where's the fury about these beheadings?

I have endured endless pious lectures about the wickedness of Vladimir Putin and Syria's President Assad from supporters of the Government's wild and ignorant foreign policy.

So how startling it was to see the same people mute themselves when Saudi Arabia, now seemingly Britain's closest ally, killed 47 people on one day, many by beheading.

Some of these victims were no doubt real criminals, though the expression 'Saudi justice system' is a grim and bloodstained joke, so we cannot be sure of the guilt of the condemned. But some were political dissenters.

Yet a government that squawks mightily over every Islamic State death video was strangely measured over these very similar events, which incidentally menace the peace of the Middle East.

I took a careful look at Government statements. They all had the same odd, weak theme. We condemn the death penalty, whoever carries it out.

David Cameron said: 'We condemn and do not support the death penalty in any circumstances and that includes Saudi Arabia.'

The Foreign Office said: 'The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.'

So, as far as Mr Cameron and the Foreign Office are concerned, the beheading of a political opponent after a jury-less, unfair trial in a country with no free press is just the same as the execution in Texas of a bloody murderer convicted after due process by an independent jury of free men and women under the scrutiny of a free press. And we condemn them both equally. And that's all we're going to say. Now, would you like to buy some aeroplanes?

I have used the word 'feeble' so many times to describe this Government that the poor thing is quite exhausted and I have had to send it on holiday.

Dave and the invisible Tory disaster

Both our big political parties are badly divided, but somehow or other David Cameron's splitting pains get much less attention than Jeremy Corbyn's.

For instance, a BBC News programme last week arranged for some Blairite nobody to resign from his non-job, live on air. This event, plainly aimed at damaging Mr Corbyn, hardly fits in with the Corporation's duty to be impartial.

The fact that most Labour MPs can't stand Mr Corbyn isn't news. Next they'll be revealing to us that Ted Heath couldn't abide Margaret Thatcher. We know.

Mr Cameron is an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal

What seemed like a century of speculation on whether Dave Who had been sacked to make way for Fred Whatsit wasn't really justified. But of course the BBC isn't impartial and its idea of what is news is tinged with pink. It's crammed with shameless Leftists from cellar to chimney. So if the BBC is actively helping the Tories, which it does these days, then that must mean the Tories are now the main party of the Left.

His MPs are mostly the same, though they do a bit of pseudo-conservative braying at elections. But his voters and his remaining party members are patriotic real conservatives. He hoped to bandage this rupture by promising the EU referendum. But now he has actually been forced to keep this promise, it isn't helping much.

If he does let Ministers campaign on both sides, it will quickly be clear that hardly any of the Tory top brass, and not many of the bottom brass, genuinely want to leave the EU. They don't mind criticising it a bit, but they won't quit, and they won't fight to do so.

Most of them would rather be gagged, so they can pretend to be straining against the leash. How long can the Tory Party stay in one piece, when its leadership and its core vote are so utterly divided?

Note its references to ‘misogynist dinosaurs’ and the way it rather trails away at the end into largely irrelevant calls for ‘more policing’ as if that was the point. However, it shows commendable signs of dawning doubt, so I accepted the invitation to pedal across London to New Broadcasting House, the BBC’s unsatisfactory new plastic palace, and discuss the matter with her (alas, she was in a remote studio, so we didn’t actually meet)